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"Championing an unproved or unpopular idea is a good way to put your academic career on permanent hold. "My thesis adviser was worried, too," says Shipman. "He was happy to know that I am beginning collaborations with biologists."" -Adam Frank

I don't particularly care for that statement about "championing and unproved or unpopular idea. . .." Unproved? First, very few scientists will talk about "proving" things; they tend to talk in terms of "supporting" hypotheses, not "proving" hypotheses.

And, secondly, what else should graduate students (if you didn't catch it, that's the group that the comment refers to) be doing? Most graduate schools require grad students to conduct "original research." The guidelines might be a little gray, but the idea is to deliberately find ideas (hypotheses) that are "unproven" for research. If grad students (and scientists in general) simply repeated the same experiments over and over, where would that get us?

The "unpopular" part, well, I can see where young scientists might find their careers put on hold if they attempt to overturn popular hypotheses in favor of unpopular hypotheses.

But we still get back to the same sets of questions:

1) Do bees communicate with one another?
2) Can they convey direction and/or distance information about resources through their communication system?
3) What sort of communication system do they use if they are capable of conveying such information? Has such a system been observed among bees?
4) If it's not a "dance language" that bees use (and it certainly could be that bees are using some other form of communication), what's the purpose of the "dances?"